To Vivan And To Better Politics When We Need It Most

It’s funny how I interviewed Vivan Sundaram only once, but I’ve been having conversations with him in my head ever since. It was the year 2011 and Vivan’s latest recycling of trash was on display at the Lalit Kala Academy in Delhi. The previous avatar, titled ‘Trash’, was in 2005 – a continuing theme, of taking used objects and turning them into something spectacular. This time around, it was re-christened ‘Gagawaka – Making Strange’ and on display were blow-up dolls and mannequins wearing recycled film from hospitals, red bras, paper cups and tampons. 

I was stupid enough to gaze long and hard at the tampons, blink hard and ask, on camera, “And what is that?” 

Vivan laughed but said, ever so gently with no hint of condescension whatsoever, “Come on, you’re a woman, figure it out.” 

“Oh tampons,” I said, feeling like I should allow myself to be eaten by the nearest available mannequin. 

Ever since, I have been mesmerised by what I saw that day. 

The recycling, a deeply political act, was about many things as Vivan patiently explained. 

Garbage is what we put out each day, while looking past those who collect it. And we imagine that we stand on merit and that our being, where we are and those who take out our trash being where they are, has nothing to do with happenstance and the accident of birth and thousands of years of discrimination against garbage collectors or people assigned to one profession and forced to stay there. The recycling was to my mind, as I played back the stunning images and experience that Vivan created, about inverting our gaze about caste, about making discrimination trash and hoping to shock us gallery-goers out of our bigoted stupors. 

If you can take toxicity and make something beautiful out of it, you invert identity politics as well. You say a loud and proud `up yours’ to a world turned into a giant homogenous hate-filled hole. 

All around us is the putrid smell of hate. Now it’s Umar Khalid as target, now Rahul Gandhi. Everyone falls down as our world collapses, to be swallowed whole by one large bigoted monster, the Great Dictator, the Holier than Holy, Epithet eating Hindutva establishment aka our government. Eating into our collective sanity, one day and person and politician at a time. I reacted with body and mind by relocating, away from Delhi, the place where I grew up and the only place I knew – Shamli in Uttar Pradesh, to set up an NGO and work on transformation in my own way. 

One of the communities we work with – the Dehwas, are a people formerly labelled criminals and then people who work largely in the garbage recycling business. I looked in fascination over the last few years as the Dehwas took apart watch parts and the rubber soles of chappals, scraps of cloth, metal, plastic and, in my mind, saw them magically transform into Vivan’s latest exhibits. A new Gagawaka, only in Shamli. The artistic transformation would cause a real transformation in the image of the Dehwas and become a talking point for the city of Shamli. `Vivan, please allow a few young artists inspired by your ideas and your politics to come and transform us, our minds, our world,’ I kept saying to myself in my loopy hallucinatory way, while not reaching out to him in real life at all. It was my private ongoing fantasy lived out through Vivan. 

The day I spent with him at the Sahitya Academy, where he had to educate me about tampons as well as jockeys was one where a part of me still lives. And will continue to, as I use it to create a different kind of transformation – that’s the power of one day, spent looking inside the universe of Vivan. 

As I watched the video we made while I was a journalist at Tehelka, the `we’ includes the now famous and absolutely stunning filmmaker Shaunak Sen, who was filming the Vivan exhibition – it may even have been his idea in the first place. Shaunak went on to make `Cities of Sleep,’ one way of looking at trash and transformation. And then the film everyone knows about is `All That Breathes,’ and if you have not seen it you absolutely must. A film where three young men living in the middle of piles of garbage, rescue kites that feed off the innards of the city of Delhi and together – people and kites, like Vivan Sundaram’s art, change our perspective of what is garbage and where beauty lies. I haven’t asked Shaunak this but I wonder now, whether a bit of Gagawaka lives on in him as it does in me. 

We need to `Make Strange,’ as Vivan puts it, when the normal is obscenely abnormal and when our rights, our voice, our dissent, our air is unbreathable. Vivan, thank you for your shit. I can’t think of a better way of saying it than that. 

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